Originally Posted by kalniel
People are buying discrete, gaming, graphics cards for their PCs. In spades. There aren't many reasons to buy a gaming graphics card for a PC when it doesn't need one to do all the other things a PC can do. The conclusion must be that people buy gaming graphics cards (cf workstation cards) to play graphically intensive games on their PCs.

And that is not because of new video format that grow more and more demanding by the day and the introduction of HD TV.

The predominance of console games and their port has brought inertia to the PC hardware requirements.

Consoles are somehow five years old and the average life expectancy of a gamer PC used to be around 2 years. Consoles have brought stability and PC video games have grown less graphically intensive relatively to the PC graphics potential than they used to be. Most of the times, you no longer need the last video card generation to play the lastest PC video games with options set on full.

The number of PC gamers is told to be 200 millions people. That is quite a lot of people. And the article reported guess estimates of the number of copies illegally downloaded for some big hits. Hard to connect the two though.